August 2009
55 posts
“OOF”
– me.
I’m out of office until September 8th. TTYL.
True Story: Bernanke Falls Victim to Identify... →
couldn’t make this one up if you tried.
“PR, Marketing and Advertising suck”
– Loic Le Meur
Total Newspaper Ad Revenues Drop 29 Percent;... →
“there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store...”
– How Big Is the Apple iPhone App Economy? The Answer Might Surprise You
Teaching Ruby to High School Girls →
What Is Really Happening to the Venture Capital... →
“There is a direct correlation between the quality of the morning run and...”
– me
“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and...”
– Cicero via Chris Michel
“buying software is more like joining a club with annual dues. Every year,...”
– State of the Art - A Leap Forward With Snow Leopard - NYTimes.com
“Lesson One - Know Your Market”
– Lesson One - Know Your Market - jamiequint’s posterous
Chicago’s youngest crime blogger is 16 years old →
“If we all just ate an apple a day, this whole health care debate would be moot,...”
– Chris Sacca
“I didn’t know my own strength.”
– Whitney
“careful what you wish for, cause you just might get it.”
– Pussycat Dolls
Time-to-Greatness at Early-Stage Companies →
Six strategies for overcoming “chicken and egg”... →
“If you live long enough, people will think you did everything”
– Paul Rand
“Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create your own logically...”
– Amazon Web Services Blog: Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
“Shut up and put your money where your mouth is, that’s what you get for...”
– Katy P.
Hacking a google interview →
“The internet has been dead and boring for a while now.”
– Mark Cuban.
“There will always be something on someone else’s device that looks more...”
– Mossberg.
Twitter Flew Above The 50 Million Uniques Mark For... →
“Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire...”
– Socialnomics
“Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4...”
– Socialnomics
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity... →
Why you should not keep your startup idea secret →
“This site [Craigslist] not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder,...”
– Fred Wilson
TweetDeck, ME.
True story: In July of last year I was so instantly enamored with this new service I had tried, TweetDeck, that I immediately reached out to the company’s founder, Iain Dodsworth, and asked if I could buy his company. I’ll remind you that TweetDeck had only launched on 4, July 2008. It was love at first site.
Iain smartly said no. He was just getting started on a big, big...
Facebook Enters The Top 5 Of All Sites →
Facebook now #5 website in the U.S. — wasn’t in top 10 last year.
Twitter has also entered the top 50, in at number 42 with an estimated 21.2 Million monthly uniques, however Twitter is probably undercounted by about 30-40% since about that much of Twitter’s usage is from clients such as Tweetdeck.
Mad Men Season 3, Episode 2: Did anyone else notice that Roger’s daughter’s wedding is the day after JFK’s assassination? Girl can’t catch a break.
10 Tips For Founders
Ship it! Stop debating, stop analyzing, stop featuring, and just ship it! Goal #1 should be to get your product to market as quickly as possible so that you can minimize the time it takes to start getting real user feedback. You are going to get a lot of the early stuff wrong so get it out there and start learning as fast as you can.
Stay small. Minimum required people in order to ship it.
...
“No one else has been hiring. It’s been a great environment for us because the...”
– Zuck (Facebook) on FB’s plans to grow its staff by 50% this year.
The Funded Publishes Ideal First Round Term Sheet... →
This makes a lot of sense. No startup should spend more than $10K to close a round of financing and this will help towards that end.
The 5 devices I use most
1. Blackberry
2. MacBook Pro 15”
3. Treadmill
4. Apple TV
5. Jura Espresso Machine
“Life is a beta. If you doubt that, just go back and look at your own last 2...”
– me
The 5 Services I Use Most
1. Facebook
2. TweetDeck
3. Skype
4. itunes
5. Everything else
betashop
betashop is my new website/brand.
I’m also now http://www.facebook.com/betashop and soon to be http://www.twitter.com/betashop, where i’ll be setting up my personal twitter account in the next few days.
I’ll post here about things I’m doing, companies I’m advising, projects I find interesting, and about my investments. I’m not sure exactly where it will go...
“I’m not an angel investor. I’m not a VC. I’m a user. I will...”
– me
seedcamp
I’ll be in London Sept 21-22, attending seedcamp as a product development mentor.
onething.com
Outside of XING, I’m currently advising a stealth startup, onething.com. More details on this one coming soon.
In December 2008, 11 months after we got started,...
Now, THAT, was cool.
People wrote some really nice stuff about us. What an awesome and fast ride.
In 2008 I founded socialmedian
2008 was a blast. I was a fulltime product manager on socialmedian, working with the best team ever, True Sparrow. I travelled to Pune, India 13 times in 12 months in 2008 to work with the True Sparrow team. We shipped code daily and practiced the Ship It! model for product development, living off of user feedback to rapidly iterate.
In 2004 I founded Jobster
We had some successes at Jobster. We had some failures too.
Most of all, we learned a lot.
